James Kim experiences with Navigation system

There is an interesting article on how some people suspect that the James Kim tragedy may have been caused by having chosen a dangerous road based on an electronic mapping system:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...MNGTMMQTVO1.DTL

Last year, I found myself in a somewhat similar situation. I was in my 2004 Prius with Nav system, driving to the Lost Coast for a backpacking trip, in the furthest north part of California, almost up by the Oregon border.

It turned out there was one extremely "backcountry" road and a more developed road that went the same place (heading towards the coast from inland). The Prius nav system chose the "backcountry" road.

For about 2-3 hours we drove this road that was really only suitable to 4WD use. We never saw anyone else on the road, and had to drive extremely carefully, picking our way through the rocks at about 5-10 mph in order to avoid getting the undercarriage hung up on a boulder. A few times the undercarriage did get strongly hit by rocks, so much that I had to get out of the car and look to see if there was any damage. And traction wasn't great so there were a few hills that required a few tries of backing up to gain momentum to get over. Not to mention a few streams we had to cross that were almost up to the level of the doors.

We had all our backpacking equipment so we figured worse case if we got stuck we could camp and then hike out, but if we didn't have that option, I would say this road would be totally unsafe.

Other times driving out in rural areas I've had the Prius suggest roads that were barricaded because they went across private property.

For the most part this only occurs in very rural areas, but I did have a situation where the Prius guided me onto a dangerous rutted seasonal dirt/rock mountain road while driving in fairly well-populated Marin county (just north of San Francisco) to highway 1.